Tech 24

From Austin to London, the current robotaxi boom is raising hard questions about safety and jobs. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has ordered staff to stop using Anthropic's Claude Code after the US coding tool was found to be flagging users’ connecting from China. But Anthropic is already trying to stop Chinese firms from using Claude at all and accuses Alibaba of running large "distillation" campaigns against it, saying that the Chinese giant created around 25,000 fake accounts to train its own models on the US AI programme.

Is this the heatwave that finally changes French minds on air conditioning? Not for Environment Minister Monique Barbut. She said she was "horrified" by the idea of it becoming widespread. The rest of the world looked on perplexed as France suffered a brutal week, particularly for schools, hospitals and care homes. Long suspicious of it, French people are slowly adopting A/C, but it remains politically controversial and difficult to install in historic towns and cities. Technology Editor Peter O'Brien pours cold water on what he says is a needlessly hot topic in France.

VivaTech turned 10 this year and Europe's biggest tech showcase has never been louder, shinier or more crowded. But walking the show floors, FRANCE 24 tech reporters Charlotte Lam and Peter O'Brien were drawn to one topic in particular: not about productivity or performance, but about companionship and how the booming AI market is filling that void. Is it a cure or a curse?

France's biggest geek get-together started with a bang this year. For its 10th anniversary, the VivaTech trade show took to the Champs-Élysées, billing the installation as "Europe's largest open-air technology experience".

With SpaceX set to become the first AI-era giant to go public on Friday June 12, governments on both sides of the Atlantic are racing to define their relationship with the industry. Washington is in talks with OpenAI about a government equity stake, while Brussels has unveiled a new tech sovereignty package. In this week's Tech 24, we lay out the two very different visions of how to shape artificial intelligence's future.

They first made headlines by bolting facial recognition onto Meta's Ray-Bans to show how easily the technology could identify strangers in the street. Now AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio have a product of their own: Mira, a $650 pair of AI glasses, with no camera this time, that quietly transcribes and summarises everything so you can turn your life into a searchable database.

Tech giants are increasingly looking beyond Earth to solve one of AI's biggest growing pains: where to put all the computers.

After Donald Trump announced a pause to the US operation in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran's online propaganda machine was quick to declare victory. Explosive Media, one of the groups behind Lego-style videos mocking Trump, proclaimed it "TACO Tuesday", ie that the US president had "chickened out". Meanwhile, Minecraft, the Minions and Simpsons-style characters are joining the legions of copycats. FRANCE 24's Technology Correspondent Peter O’Brien looks at how these videos are actually made.

It's being called the most consequential courtroom drama Silicon Valley has ever produced. Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is squaring off against Sam Altman, the man who put artificial intelligence in everyone's pocket, in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California.

It could end white-collar work. It could end poverty. It could end humanity. From AI's boosters and doomsters alike, bumptious predictions abound. But in workplaces, the technology, like so many before it, is becoming mundane. Are things really different this time? We take a closer look in this special edition of Tech 24.

From the announcement of a new EU age-verification app to a video summit of European leaders and legal threats in Australia, governments moved quickly this week on a debate years in the making. FRANCE 24's Charlotte Lam has more in Tech 24.

One of the world's leading AI companies has built a model so powerful that it refuses to fully release it publicly just yet, prompting urgent talks with everyone from Wall Street CEOs to financial regulators in the UK.

The law is finally catching up with social media. This week, a California jury found Meta and Google liable for addicting a child to their platforms. On Tuesday, the French Senate will vote to ban under-15s from social media, with other countries making similar plans. Is humanity saved? Or are things more complicated than that?

Five years and more than $80 billion later, Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality dream seems to be being dismantled, and replaced with equally ambitious AI projects. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

It started quietly, with a handful of posts on tech forums and Reddit explaining why and how you should uninstall and unsubscribe from ChatGPT. Now the campaign #QuitGPT has more than 4 million participants worldwide, and the numbers are still climbing. FRANCE 24 tech journalist Charlotte Lam tells us more.

In the hours leading up to the US attack on Iran, Donald Trump announced that technology company Anthropic would be banned from all work with the federal government. At the same time, Anthropic's artificial intelligence chatbot Claude was reportedly being used by the Pentagon to prepare the attack. FRANCE 24 tech journalist Charlotte Lam gives us her analysis.

A struggle to control artificial intelligence is playing out just as the United States increasingly deploys the technology in conflicts from Venezuela to Iran.

Slandered by one AI robot and misquoted in a news article by another, US-based software engineer Scott Shambaugh has made it his mission to become the cautionary tale by which we start to take autonomous artificial intelligence seriously.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Pentagon used Anthropic's AI model, Claude, as part of its operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

A newly released batch of more than three million documents from the US Department of Justice is casting fresh light on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to some of the biggest names in tech.

When the Mongolian language started to disappear from classrooms in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China's north, many turned to the internet to keep their language and culture alive. A new investigation shows those remaining online spaces are being targeted by the Chinese government.

French President Emmanuel Macron wants to fast-track legislation to ban social media for teens under the age of 15, with parliament slated to vote on a draft proposal on Monday. We take a closer look in this edition of Tech 24.

Iran is 10 days into an internet blackout, which rights groups say is intended to prevent further protests and conceal the regime's deadly crackdown. What happens now is unclear. Iranian digital activists are warning the blackout may become "permanent," but local media report that the authorities are considering a gradual return to the internet.